berto
I Saw the Devil
Dawn, mate. Army is his upcoming one.
The Snyder Cut
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V's patron
be loyal to what matters
The Nightwing movie was officially attached to Chris McKay as director and Bill Dubuque as writer, no mention of Phil Lord aside from Nightwing featuring in LEGO Batman. But ultimately it wouldn't matter who was previously on it or when by the time Joss Whedon got there, because he wouldn't care. He got himself on the Avengers by supplanting Zak Penn and replacing his script even though Penn was officially on the project since 2006 and had rewritten the script multiple times across four years according to how well the other Marvel movies would be received.
According to Amy Pascal's biography of Whedon, he told Kevin Feige straight up before he was even appointed to direct the film, “I don’t think you have anything. You need to pretend this draft never happened.” He'd also claim on his own that "I started at square 1 on the [Avengers] script. I mean, straight up. I don't wanna rag on it, but I fought that credit. I was very upset about it. I know how the Guild works, first guy on a movie and all that, but I've never had good luck with arbitrations." [...] "I read [Penn's script] one time, and I've never seen it since. I was like, "Nope. There's nothing here." There was no character connection." [...] "There was a script. There just wasn't a script I was going to film a word of." He had no intention of collaborating with Penn or reaching any compromise on the script to boost that one up, he just replaced it wholesale, F the Other Guy.
Maybe he'd have a point if he could write scripts worth a damn himself, but he can't really. Dude penned friggin Alien: Resurrection. Find a single person on Earth that considers that a good Alien movie without them comparing it to the newer films and how bad they are.
His track record with other DC movies and the Avengers script itself tells a story along the same lines. He was attached to Wonder Woman in 2006 and left the project in 2007. His explanation why at the time was, "I had a take on the film that, well, nobody liked. Hey, not that complicated." [...] "Let me stress that everybody at the studio and Silver Pictures were cool and professional. We just saw different movies, and at the price range this kind of movie hangs in, that's never gonna work. Non-sympatico. It happens all the time."
Cordial at first, but he wound up saying on a later occasion that ”I couldn’t stand the idea of one more person asking me who was going to play Wonder Woman.” [...] "I in no way want this to be a slam on Warner Bros., but the fact of the matter is, it was a waste of my time. We never [wanted] to make the same movie; none of us knew that. And it was a waste of their time because I had a lot of trouble writing — not just writing that, but writing at all." In other words, his experience directing ruined his ability to write because "everything was negotiable" (guess he'd never heard of killing his darlings), being asked about who would play Wonder Woman made him almost need therapy, and while he was still on the project, Joel Silver [producer at Silver Pictures] bought another WW script and said No to Whedon's, which he claimed he saw coming and wasn't blindsided by.
It's not clear how Whedon can be "well aware that people were not liking what I was doing" but then "none of us knew" that both sides wanted a different movie from each other, but sure! It sounds more like Silver knew very well that he wanted a script that wasn't Whedon's and didn't even bother telling Whedon how to edit his to an acceptable level because of how deeply flawed the premise was, suggesting it was a lost cause. Whedon himself said he refused to compromise to the level of doing his whole script from scratch-- presumably because of the difficulty he had writing, so it'd have been useless for Silver to explicitly express that had a problem with a significant amount of the script because Whedon would refuse to change it to the level necessary despite offering to change it to the level necessary with, "Can you tell me what they want? Can you tell me what they don’t like?” with intent to get the script accepted and made into a movie. But later he'd toss another script in the trash and do it from scratch instead of telling the other writer what was needed.
At this point I think I may have mentioned the Wonder Woman script more times than I've explained what exactly it contains. Here it is, the script, the whole script, and nothing but the script. When it leaked in 2016, he defended it with, "People say it's not woke enough. I think they're not looking at the big picture. It’s easy to take one phrase out of context, and [I wasn’t] the most woke individual who ever lived at that time, 10 years ago. But I was in there swinging and the movie has integrity and the characters have integrity and I stand by it."
Aside from the part where he's on record declaring himself "woke bae" and a male feminist and then seems surprised people are holding him to any kind of standard and that standards for empowering media evolve with the times, the hell does he want, a cookie with a glass of milk and a pat on the back? Not many people were anywhere close to woke in the year 2006, it was 2000-and-flipping-6, and that script still got shot down. He should have been embarrassed and spent less time blaming the people who "thought it wasn't woke enough" and accepted that the people he was trying to appease didn't enjoy a script where we're introduced to Steve as, "The pilot holds the steering column as it bucks. Maybe 30, kind, determined eyes in a working man's face." but Diana is "the silhouetted girl", "THE GIRL", and then, "To say she is beautiful is almost to miss the point. She is elemental, as natural and wild as the luminous flora surrounding. Her dark hair waterfalls to her shoulders in soft arcs and curls. Her body is curvaceous, but taut as a drawn bow. She wears burnished metal bracelets on both wrists, wide and intricately detailed. Her shift is of another era; we'd call it ancient Greek. She is barefoot."
Or maybe they didn't like that Wonder Woman is called a "whore" or "bitch", treated like she's overly arrogant and in need of humility even by Steve and not just the villains of the story, gratuitous mention of her bare feet, her somehow knowing the term "be man enough" when she has literally never encountered a man until Steve, and an extended sequence that treated her like 2013 Lara Croft. The "man sits on a lasso and spills his feelings" was in this script before it ended up on JL, by the way. So he's been reusing ideas from over a decade ago.
Compare that to the screenplay for 2017 Wonder Woman by Allan Heinberg, Zack Snyder, and Jason Fuchs that introduces Diana Prince as an "antiquities expert", doesn't have Steve lecturing her about how out of touch and privileged she is, and there's not a single "whore" or "bitch" in sight. How bout that? People enjoy characters and not kink vehicles.
Anyway, he also pitched an idea for Batman around the time Batman Begins was starting development, and WB shot that one down, too. He planned on, paraphrased, the orphaned Bruce Wayne as a morbid, death-obsessed kid. There was a scene [...] where young Bruce tries to protect this girl from being bullied in an alley, an alley like the one his parents were murdered in. The actual GQ article that's sourced (also where the "There wasn't a script I was going to film a word of" quote comes from) spends way too much time fellating Whedon, describing how emotional he gets from his old, rejected scripts, and making him seem like a perpetual underdog, so I didn't source it directly. From the way it was worded, it's like people believe Whedon is this poor, helpless victim of "the corporate machine" that he keeps going back to and trying to win over, being rejected by, and promptly badmouthing when he doesn't get his way. Like a "Nice Guy" to that girl that wouldn't date him in high school.
For all the dirt he slung on Penn's script, Whedon's 2012 Avengers wasn't any better. Along with liberal use of the F-bomb making his screenplay look amateurish in the part of the process where every word should count for something and instead he devotes it to artificial toughness, he introduced the Avengers by heroic monikers or general professions ... if they were guys. Even Coulson is described as "A Fed in a suit with badass shades", but Maria Hill is "sexy, fierce, and determined" and Black Widow is introduced as "Tall Thug is in the middle of a brutal beating on Natasha Romanoff, a slewing, foxy, unbelievably sexy spy". He can't stop calling them sexy like that matters. The only women with a name not called sexy, beautiful, "tasty looking", or lovely in the WW script or Avengers script is Ginny Wells, a "smartly but practically dressed" reporter who gets killed two whole pages after her introduction, Dr. Moira Sullivan, who's Irish and redheaded then gets her personality described, and Pepper Potts who's ... also a redhead? I guess Joss has an anti-type or something.
I don't think he would care whether or not Nightwing was already being worked on, if he wanted to write Nightwing. But it's easier with the Batgirl project for him to hide behind his 90s era "feminism" where all a woman has to do is throw a punch to be a Strong Female Character, and that superficial achievement would excuse the various transgressions in the script towards its heroine in an effort to "explore" how she comes into power, and by that I mean punish her for having it.
"She came up, and I started getting obsessed with how a young woman could get hardcore enough to need to put on the cowl. Like, what's her damage? She didn't have her parents killed in an alley. Who is this person, who decides — rather than being forced to by their childhood trauma — decides to pick up this life? How intense and driven that person is ... I just couldn't stop thinking about it."
Self-proclaimed "woke bae" has no idea that heroes (particularly heroines) can have an internal sense of justice and compassion and don't need trauma to force them into saving lives, like literally every real-life person that decides to become an EMT or firefighter! No wonder he kept Nora Allen's Murder on the theatrical release of the Justice League; he understands Barry's character the same way Geoff Johns does, which is not at all.
Let's take our pick of the following tropes he would have inserted in the hypothetical Batgirl project: (a) the script describes her sexiness as the primary facet of her character if it's not literally the introductory sentence to her; (b) the narrative has multiple men be unequivocally sexist + belittling + lecturing to the heroine to force an uphill struggle as she wastes time proving her worth to them and teaching them a lesson instead of saving the day; (c) there's a narrative of women being enslaved / shamed / depowered / dominated as a matter of fact somewhere in the past lore, in the background of the current setting, or literally at the forefront as the heroine's plot over the course of the movie; (d) the heroine or someone she knows is kidnapped / beaten / raped / impregnated specifically to achieve the previous point; (e) if she gets pregnant or otherwise possessed by a foreign entity, she dies birthing it; (f) if she can't get pregnant, her subplot revolves around her infertility and how it makes her less of a woman; (g) there's the Whedon Wish Fulfillment Self-Insert, a.k.a. the token geek male character who's described as cute but schlubby, yet has enough power to enforce what I said in Point C against the heroine because he feels emasculated by her presence and thinks himself entitled to respect; (h) the hero (or a hero) who might fall into the first half of Point G's description literally falls into the heroine's cleavage because "humor" if it's not because of the latter half of Point G; (i) there's a gratuitous nude scene with the heroine; (j) liberal mentions of prostitution or an embellished version of it somewhere in the story paired with a man who does Point B until he learns a lesson via the woman enduring Point D at which point he starts to respect her.
With this I've just described a majority of the shows he's run on top of the movies he's directed and only Alien: Resurrection subverts it by having Point E happen to a dude. Chestbursters are egalitarian.
But I mean. He never got to do Batgirl after all because he just couldn't come up with anything. Either he didn't have a story, or he had one but there was no place for it in DC anymore. Nightwing would probably be a repellent to him; sure, the Graysons' murders and Dick's associated trauma would be intact, but if he wanted to be comics accurate he'd have to acknowledge the fact that Nightwing is recognized as sexy to the point where Midnighter recognizes him by his butt. Whedon would sooner give us the abomination of "Ric Grayson" instead.
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V's patron
be loyal to what matters
Not a problem, Warner Bros has said a lot of things so I wouldn't be surprised if they did mention that Phil Lord was on Nightwing at some point.
Remember when they said that Zack is "handing the baton to Joss" and that the film would retain the tone of Snyder's cut? Good times, good times.
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Remember when they said that Zack is "handing the baton to Joss" and that the film would retain the tone of Snyder's cut? Good times, good times.
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AgentRedgrave
Legendary Devil Hunter
Okay surprised I haven't commented on this yet. Time to rectify that.
Well first of all, I wanna say I apologize to everyone who's been screaming and shouting for the Snyder Cut for the past three years. I never thought it would actually happen and I have to say the trailer looks pretty good.
While I admit I didn't hate the theatrical cut, least not as much as I hated BvS (The theatrical cut), this does look like it's gonna be a better film.
Well first of all, I wanna say I apologize to everyone who's been screaming and shouting for the Snyder Cut for the past three years. I never thought it would actually happen and I have to say the trailer looks pretty good.
While I admit I didn't hate the theatrical cut, least not as much as I hated BvS (The theatrical cut), this does look like it's gonna be a better film.
berto
I Saw the Devil
Neither did I and I was eager for it.
Collider: Exclusive: Harry Lennix Confirms He's Martian Manhunter in 'The Snyder Cut'
Good news to hear. Until this exclusive, the news around Lennix was that he was supposed to be MM but his involvement was cut (albeit with fantheories supporting his presence in Man of Steel), but he'll appear "up there with Batman and Superman".
V's patron
be loyal to what matters
The ‘Snyder Cut’ of Justice League is coming to HBO Max on March 18th
Streaming exclusively on HBO Max
www.google.com
We get a release date for the Snyder Cut.
Sparda's rejected son
For Edenoi!
Am I the only who fears that the hype for this will be better than the actual film? I liked the original JL mind you so I am sure I will like this one, but this hype train is too big. Anything could happen.